Joan Mitchell has long been hailed as a formidable creative force—a painter who attained critical acclaim and success in the male-dominated art circles of 1950s New York. She then spent nearly four decades in France creating distinctive, vibrant abstract paintings that draw on landscape, memory, poetry, and music. With its world premiere at SFMOMA from September 4, 2021 through January 17, 2022, Joan Mitchell is a comprehensive retrospective featuring approximately eighty distinguished works.
In addition to rarely seen early paintings that established the artist’s career, the exhibition includes colorful large-scale multi-panel masterpieces from her later years. SFMOMA’s presentation will include ten paintings not traveling to other venues, several from the museum’s own holdings. These works demonstrate Mitchell’s ability to create powerful paintings in widely different scales and her propensity for using bold experimentation to find her way from one major body of work to the next. With suites of major paintings, sketchbooks, and drawings as well as an illuminating selection of the artist’s letters and photographs, Joan Mitchell opens a new window into the richness and range of the artist’s practice and reveals the significance of her artistic achievement.
